I read the International Herald Tribune while I lived abroad and continued reading it online once I was back in the States. Then the Times bought it and it became more and more irrelevant (adding more and more limited access Times stories to their front page) until I realized I just wasn’t reading it anymore and removed the shortcut from my bookmarks.

I find it of interest that a prize named after such an … academic poet would be awarded for such personal poetry that the author sometimes regrets her choices. Not surprising. Just interesting. It seems that most things get turned on their heads.

“A history teacher got more granular. He pointed out that the students’ sentences were short and disjointed. What words, Scharff asked, did kids who wrote solid paragraphs use that the poor writers didn’t? Good essay writers, the history teacher noted, used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas—words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher devised a quick quiz that required students to use those conjunctions. To the astonishment of the staff, she reported that a sizable group of students could not use those simple words effectively. The harder they looked, the teachers began to realize, the harder it was to determine whether the students were smart or not—the tools they had to express their thoughts were so limited that such a judgment was nearly impossible.”